Article Summary
- Illinois’ paper ballots system protects vote tabulation from hacking, but the rollback of cybersecurity programs and reduced federal intelligence-sharing leaves voters more exposed to foreign disinformation.
- Trump’s new demand that Congress pass citizenship and photo ID requirements poses a potential long-term barrier to voting, critics say, even though data shows non-citizen voting is extremely rare.
- Fair elections advocates are watching closely how the Illinois Primary next Tuesday unfolds and consider it almost a practice run for the November midterms, when they see real challenges looming.
This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
SPRINGFIELD (Capitol News Illinois)— Illinois election officials and community leaders say they are confident the state is mostly insulated from the Trump administration’s aggressive moves and heated rhetoric on election administration as Illinois’ March 17 primary approaches.
Republican county clerks cautioned, however, that while they weren’t fazed by President Donald Trump’s messaging or proposed changes to voting laws, they are concerned about how federal cuts to cybersecurity initiatives could affect future elections in the state.
Last month, Trump suggested Republicans should “nationalize” elections and “take over the voting” in select unspecified places despite the Constitution’s express delegation of election administration to the states.
In January, the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 election ballots in Georgia’s Fulton County — and more recently, issued a subpoena to Arizona for its voting results — after Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in those swing states. The Trump administration also made major cuts last year to the cybersecurity agency responsible for bolstering state election security.
Read more: Illinois is one of 23 states and D.C. that are being sued for voter information.
Critics warn these moves are a signal the administration may look to expand its use of aggressive tactics to counter potential Republican losses in the midterms, but many Illinois election officials pushed back on the notion of a looming federal intervention or a fundamental rupture between local and federal officials.
“There is a lot of talk,” said Sangamon County Clerk Don Gray, a Republican. “But until I see (the federal government) take concrete action, there’s no sense in stirring up people’s fears or cynicism.”
Feds at polling places?
Some in Trump’s orbit have even stoked fears of federal immigration authorities being deployed to polling locations, a worry DuPage County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek sought to address in a press conference last week.
“It is a federal crime for the military or federal agents to interfere in elections or intimidate voters,” she said. “Those crimes will not be tolerated in DuPage County.”
In an interview, Kaczmarek, a Democrat, said she was only addressing concerns that were already circulating.
“I did not do anything to start the fear,” she said. “The fear was already there.”
On Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration to compel a response to whether the government was planning to deploy agents or troops to the polls. The Department of Homeland Security has denied that its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would be dispatched to polling places around the country in the midterms.
Late last month, the FBI led a call with state election officials from across the country, including Illinois, to discuss the upcoming election. During the call, federal officials reportedly tried to assuage concerns of the prospect of a federal presence at voting locations.
“Some participants (in the call) asked about potential federal presence and increased involvement in the 2026 elections,” Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections, told Capitol News Illinois. “The response from the participating agencies indicated no such plans.”
Gray, the Sangamon County clerk, said election officials should be careful making public projections about election interference without evidence of “concrete action” to back them up. He argued such talk can undermine public trust in elections and noted he had received no indication federal officials were planning any sort of election intervention.
“We need to see definitive action before getting people riled up,” he said.
Shuttered cyber programs
Another element of the shifting relationship between local elections officials and the federal government is the cuts to federal programs designed to bolster election cybersecurity of states.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has inflicted deep cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal entity charged with providing cybersecurity support to the states, among other missions. While states are responsible for running elections, the federal government has long lent its cyber capabilities to help secure them.
The cuts have targeted CISA’s workforce and led to a significant drawdown of its election security activities, according to the think tank Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. A survey carried out last year by the Brennan Center found that more than 60% of local election officials nationwide were concerned about cuts to the agency.
Because Illinois conducts elections on paper ballots, the actual vote tabulations in the state remain immune from hacking, according to multiple county clerks interviewed by CNI. But the Trump administration’s gutting of programs focused on combatting foreign disinformation could lead to real-world effects in the state.
“We are under constant attack from foreign agitators,” said Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman, a Republican. “We know from information we’ve already collected in previous years from the feds that China, Iran, Russia, our foreign adversaries, they’ve all attacked little bitty Tazewell.”
Dietrich said Illinois is uniquely insulated from federal cybersecurity cuts because of the state’s massive buildup of its cyber capabilities after the 2016 hacking of its voter database. The Justice Department accused Russian intelligence of the breach, which exposed information on millions of registered Illinois voters according to a department report.
In the wake of the hack, the state established the Cyber Navigator Program to better protect its election system from compromise. The program, which is now fully state funded, embeds one employee at Illinois’ Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center to monitor potential threats to elections, including misinformation and disinformation, Dietrich said.
Ackerman expected there to be “some gaps” due to the federal rollbacks, but he said they wouldn’t impact day-to-day operations in his county. He added that while he wasn’t concerned by Trump’s other moves regarding elections, he said he’s noticed the federal government is sharing less confidential intelligence about election threats, a development he’s less sanguine about.
“We’ve insulated and protected ourselves in previous years with the help of the federal government,” he said. “That’s the aspect that I’m nervous about. It isn’t as thorough as it has been in the past.”
SAVE America Act
On another front, in a post on his social media site Sunday, Trump said he will refuse to sign any new legislation until Congress passes the SAVE America Act. He reiterated the demand Monday at a retreat for Republican congressmen in Florida, saying the bill should be the GOP’s “No. 1 priority” before the midterms.
The proposed bill would require individuals to prove U.S. citizenship when registering to vote and require photo identification to vote in federal elections. Opponents of the measure say these requirements are onerous enough to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters in Illinois.
“This would create another barrier to the ballot box,” said Becky Simon, president of the Illinois League of Women Voters. “People do not need more barriers to the ballot box. People need to be encouraged to vote.”
The bill would place the new demands on Illinois voters to solve an issue that data show is not prevalent, as non-citizens are already barred from voting in federal elections. A 2024 audit of voter rolls in Georgia, a state long accused by Trump of widespread non-citizen voting, found only 20 non-citizens were illegally registered to vote out of 8.2 million registered voters. Out of those 20, only nine had voted illegally in previous elections.
Still, these legislative changes would take time to go into effect even if they make it through Congress and are signed into law.
“We expect the primary elections will unfold uneventfully,” Simon said. “The clerks that we’ve talked to are looking at this as almost practice for November, when they see the real challenges coming.”
Reece Dower is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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